The Making of 'Non Sequitur's

I came across this picture from John Battelle's Searchblog. Imagine if I have this kind of space for my working environtment, I'll be a very prolific blogger. Maybe like what Jason Kottke has with his kottke.org. For me, his blog is one of the best chockfull-of-goodie blog. Legend has it that he quit his day job to set all of his time to work on the blog. Now if he pose one question on his blog, he get literaly hundreds of respons. Seems that it didn't went financially too disapointing as well with his micropatrons concept.

I always thought magician who tell of their secrets, like Penn and Teller sometime do, is cool. I always thought what make TV serials more cooler or a movie more desirable is the 'behind the scenes' episode or 'the making of' outakes.

Despite of the shallow content you may have read, I actualy put a lot of efforts in making this blog. It's a long process I fitted in a spare times between jobs. I did it here and there where I can find a vacant onlined-computer, including several mobile ones. The source and draft materials are now really scatered all over. (I don't personally own a computer nor subscribe to an ISP). I've been very lucky to be able produce entries, six times a week, from 6th until 30th each month for full four months (well, three and a half to be exact. The first month can't really fully counted).

I wrote this blog as I would approach a show. Less and less entries are spontaneous entry, that is written and published in the same day, like the early entries. The process of writing an entry itself ussualy consisted like so: (1) Idea generation, an unstructured process of sudden insight from watching, listening, reading or a lot of daydreaming. (2) Actually sit down and write the stuff. The hardest part. Depend on the mood this is mostly a structured process, (3) Make embellisment in choosing the title, icon, and text style formating. (4) Let it subside a bit, wait for other ideas addition or some relevant events. (5) The actual publishing, plus some finalization. Sometime I produced more than one entry a day. Sometime none. Depend on the available time and mood. So I tend to maximize things when I have both the time and the mood.

You may see that I drew much stuff from Neil Gaiman. But the witty and accerbic tone (if any) was maybe influenced from Jim McLaughlin column, a comic columnist I used to read regularly long ago. If you notice, I stole many ideas from his publication also. Like inserting jokes inside a tedious legal notices, the dictionary style jokes, et cetera. Many idea I borrow from comic world, the funky chapter numbering come from ”Milk & Cheese” serial. So there, now you have it. Save for the few content, these are mostly derivative stuff. The rest, maybe the stuffs I picked somewhere along the way.

Perhaps I should do what Jason Kotke did. With all the time that I'll have, complete with a study room just looked like that, I'll be a true writter, who knew many things (like what a cicada bird is), and keep churning out stuffs that have actual depth and still entertaining. Umm yes, I'm being delusional. Well, as Conan O’Brien said in his speech: “When all else fails, there's always delusion...”